Tower of Terror
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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This Tower of Terror has nothing to do with the ride at Disneyland, although that doesn't stop "In the Hall of the Mountain King" popping into my head whenever I see the phrase through a strange line of pop-cultural osmosis that goes "theme parks, Alton Towers adverts, Edvard Grieg." At least it beats hearing U2's "Beautiful Day" in my head whenever I stumble across ITV's football coverage. But I digress: back to the gaming, and a 1990 Commodore 64 platformer called The Tower of Terror.

Grain Silo of Terror might have been more accurate if this loading screen is anything to go by. I have no idea who the people on the right are supposed to be as they don't appear in the game itself,with the possible exception of the woman. The doughy barbarian is the real mystery man here, because you don't play as a barbarian, you don't fight any barbarians and you sure as hell don't get a sword that crackles with powerful magical forces. The best weapon you get is a stick. In the end, I came to the decision that this barbarian is actually an inflatable decoy used to keep explorers away from the Tower of Terror. I have seen through this ruse because the barbarian has clearly deflated a little bit.

Tower of Terror is a scrolling platformer written by two guys called A. Kirsch and Ingo Wolf and published by a company called CP Verlag, but here's the thing - it was never (as far as I can tell) commercially released. This isn't uncommon for the home computer games of the time, given the relative ease with which they could be created by hobbyists, and there are a great deal of games for formats like the C64 and the ZX Spectrum that are complete and playable but which were never available for sale. So why write about Tower of Terror? Well, that's because to my mind it's an absolutely quintessential example of the 8-bit computer action game, before the influence of Super Mario Brothers and its successors changed the platforming landscape forever, an insect-trapped-in-amber example of the way games design used to be done. As such, I present it to you as a warning from the distant past.

That's your character, down at the bottom of the screen, the knight who looks like a cross between Ghosts'n Goblins' Arthur and Kuros from Wizards & Warriors. He moves like Arthur, too, with jumps that can't be controlled in mid-air and a combat style that consists of throwing sharp metal things ahead of himself - daggers, in this case. It is your goal to reach the top of the Tower of Terror, thus highlighting the one relatively unique aspect of this game: it scrolls upwards instead of sideways. It scrolls smoothly, too, which is nice. In fact, this game is smooth all over. You character controls well, despite the fact he suffers from the dread computer game affliction of having to press up on the joystick to jump, and he can move around at a fair old clip. For the first, ooh, thirty seconds or so, Tower of Terror seems like it might even be worth bothering with. Then it all goes tits-up.


http://retrovania-vgjunk.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/the-tower-of-terror-commodore-64.html
